Black and grey neo-trad tattoo of a faceted heart gem with ornate scrollwork and beaded drops across the neck and upper chest.

Faceted heart gem with scrollwork on neck and chest

Neo-trad · Neck · Black and grey · Photo

A large ornamental design centred on a faceted heart-shaped gem with a smaller heart set in its middle, framed by a beaded border and scrolling foliage. Below, a chain of beads drops into teardrop pendants across the upper chest. The gem uses soft grey shading to suggest facets, while the scrollwork and beads use bold black outlines and solid fills, all set on a dark background.

Neo-trad Realism Neck Chest Heart Gem Diamond Scrollwork Bead Teardrop Chain Ornament

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The brooch came across my counter on a wet Tuesday in March, wrapped in a handkerchief the colour of weak tea. I unfolded it under the green lamp and nearly laughed. A heart of faceted glass, big as a pigeon's egg, with a smaller heart pressed into its centre like a stone in a plum, and a border of tiny beads somebody had polished until they shone. Below hung a fringe of teardrops on a chain of jet. Paste, I told myself, and then I took out my loupe anyway.

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The setting was real gold, worn soft at the edges where a thumb must have rubbed it for forty years. I wrote the ticket in my best copperplate: one heart, paste, gold setting, four pounds. The woman who pledged it asked me to hold it a year and a day, and she said it the way other people say grace, with her eyes on the door. I asked why the little heart in the middle was left unset, and she said it had never been set at all. It had been cut from the same glass as the rest and kept back, like a secret.

Eleven months later the bell over my door rang at closing time, and a man in a grey coat asked for the heart by its number. I found the ticket and laid it on the counter between us. He did not reach for it. He asked me to hold it a little longer, and then he asked whether I had looked closely at the centre. I had. I told him so. He nodded as though I had passed a test he had set for someone else, and he went out into the rain without paying a penny.

I did not sell it. I sat with the loupe one more evening and watched the lamplight break across those little facets like water over a weir. Then I wrote beside the ticket in pencil, very small, *not yet*, and put the heart back in the drawer with the jet teardrops tangled round it.